‘Human sacrifice’ isn’t a practice that we tend to associate early modern Europe. Nor would we expect it to be defended in a court of law. Yet this is exactly what happened in 1783 in a case concerning a British slaving ship, the Zong. 132 African were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean, ostensibly on account of low water supplies: the slavers then tried to claim compensation from their insurers.

Christian and Islamic maritime laws have always considered it legal for a captain to ‘sacrifice’ cargo or parts of the ship to save a voyage from peril: the owner of the property can then seek compensation from the other stakeholders, and insurance contracts usually cover such payments: today the process is known as ‘general average’ (GA). But what happened when that property was comprised of human beings? A moment of crisis forces the slave’s dual status as ‘person’ and ‘thing’ to be clarified: does a society consider the slave more one, or more the other? It is often claimed that the Atlantic trade ‘commodified’ human beings to a new and greater extent, but is that reflected in legal evidence?

Most European lawyers from before 1700 actually ruled against the legality of slave jettison and sacrifice: the Flemish lawyer Matteus de Vicq writes that sailors ‘should not hesitate over… the kinship which nature creates between us, and prefer personal property… over a common slave, who is, however, a man’. It is also clear, however, that this juridical discussion was not informed by the reality of the burgeoning Atlantic trade where new mercantile practice was running well ahead of learned legal opinion. By the time of the Zong, legal reasoning was catching up.

This shift in attitude is also attested by GA procedures in the Mediterranean ,where Christian and Muslims corsairs regularly captured and enslaved their religious enemies to be ransomed or sold; the practice was declining in the late seventeenth century just as the Atlantic trade was accelerating. Mediterranean ships carrying slaves may not have faced the same constraints on supplies that led to the killing of sick, hungry, or rebellious enslaved persons in the Atlantic. Yet in legal records from Livorno, home to the Christian Mediterranean’s second-biggest slave market, we find slavers arguing that they should not have to pay GA contributions precisely because their own property – enslaved captives – was not legally ‘jettisonable’, even in theory.

Life as an enslaved person in the Mediterranean was a harsh fate and often a fatal one. Yet, in contrast to the Atlantic, conceptual and legal recognition of personhood was still afforded. Though slaves were always considered property, they were not categorized as ‘merchandise’, either in procedures themselves or in written norms. The sixteenth-century lawyer Juan de Hevia Bolaño writes that ‘slaves, or servants, are not merchandise, because men, endowed with reason, are not contained within this term’. Contrast with the words of the solicitor for the slavers in the case of the Zong: ‘this is the case of Chattels…it is the case of throwing over Goods’

General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe by Jake Dyble